James Paul Gee/What is Human

Termites are, of course, quite different from us humans, but they are also surprisingly much like us in important ways. There are few creatures on earth that can be quite social and collaborative in large groups but still retain a good deal of individual difference. Most of the creatures, aside from us (and, as it happens, naked mole rats), are insects, ants, termites, and bees.

The word “mound”, as I use it, does not mean just the tall dirt structure termites build. It means a composite living thing. This thing is made up of termites, dirt, water, air, chemicals and chemical trails, chewed-up wood, plant material, micro-organisms of all different sorts, branching networks of ever-changing tunnels, and, in Little Terman’s case, a fungus at the very bottom of the mound. In the mound, as a living breathing thing there are lots and lots of different kinds of stuff. All these elements are in it together. One for all; all for one. If one fails, they all do.

The mound—Big Terman—is dynamically changing all the time as its various elements interact, intertwine, and sometimes enter into and out of each other. So, the mound is not really a thing, not really an object, not a static entity. In reality, it is a giant process made up of many sub-processes; it is a process of processes. Things are always going on with smaller goings-on inside and part of bigger ones. If things ever stop going on, the whole “thing” dies.

The mound’s elements are always moving, acting, interacting, entering, exiting, making, unmaking, changing, assimilating, and adapting all together. So, we really need a verb name for a process (of processes) not a noun name for a static thing. It would better to call the mound, not Big Terman, but “Big Termaning”, using a process term (a verb) and not a thing term (a noun). Instead of saying “Big Terman is there”, we should really say “Big Termaning is happening there”. The mound is a happening of happenings never ceasing until death.

So, what we have in the world is Big Termaning and Little Termaning, both of them apart and together are Transacting Swarms. We have a Transacting Swarm (Little Terman) inside a bigger Transacting Swarm (the mound) inside a yet bigger Transacting Swarm (Little and Big Terman together as a system), inside a yet bigger Transacting Swarm (Little-Big Terman as part and parcel of the larger environment around the mound). It’s swarms all the way up and down.

But Little Terman proudly lives in Africa where he and his friends raise a special fungus together. They gather grass, twigs, and debris, chew them all up, bring it back to the mound, and form it into a pile at the bottom of the mound. Then, they spice up this growing pile of chewed-up woody pulp with spores of a fungus called Termitomyces (note the name). The fungus grows on the pile by digesting the cellulose in the chewed-up wood and grass and converting it into sugar and nitrogen. Presto. Termites collect and chew up food (wood) for the fungus and the fungus makes food (sugar) for the termites and they both survive. They cannot decide to go their own way unless they want to be dead termites and a dead fungus.

The termites are part of a complex system that creates, sustains, defends, and re-creates dynamic order in and around the mound in the face of the ever-present threat of disorder (disorder is the final destination of everything, according to physics). Termites are blind. They go with the flow and respond adaptively, moment by moment, to changing circumstances. They have “an aesthetic, an innate sense of how things should feel” (Marconelli 2018, p. 46) and where boundaries are arising, falling, sustaining, or changing. They create dynamic pools of orderliness by acting locally in ways that give rise to emergent results

Now, I am telling you all this stuff about termites because I am going to tell you that it is all true of humans too. However, many people will say, “But aren’t termites (like ants) just little robots carrying out algorithms; little factory workers engaged in rote tasks of just the sort we could program robots (or nanobots) to do?”. Well, plenty of scientists thought this in the past; indeed, they tried to make small termite robots (so that these nanobots could engage as a swarm in war or could make biofuel out of wood or grass). But then, a savvy scientist decided to actually look at individual termites like Little Terman. This is no easy task, since termites are very small and move around often in hordes of other termites.

Far from being robots, termites are idiosyncratic individuals and such individuals drive the whole system. Termites don’t even have fixed intrinsic task assignments, except at a very high level of description like reproductives, workers, and soldiers. They change their behavior based on clues they get from the environment and from each other.

Lisa Margonelli’s marvelous 2018 book Underbug: An obsessive tale of termites and technology, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Below are a few good books about other creatures (birds, bats, fish, octopuses, dolphins, beavers, trees, and micro-organisms) that, like termites, turn out to be quite unlike what we think they are and all of which help throw some light on what we humans are.

Some of the little creatures that compose our human microbiome also train (in our gut) our immune system cells to recognize what is “self” and what is a foreign invader (germ, parasite) that needs to be attacked and killed. This is very odd indeed. Micro-animals that are not “us” train our immune systems to recognize “us” versus “not us”, but we dare not attack “them” because in a bigger sense they are indeed “us” (our teachers). “Our” and “their” cells are inextricably mixed and interacting, so it is all really “us” in a real sense.

Humans as complex systems

Humans are no more “just us” than are termites, though “us” is really an inclusive “we”, including our micro-organisms, and indeed, at any point in time, all the chemicals, particles, and sources of energy that are constantly and dynamically entering and leaving us and changing us continuously. We are legion. All this “stuff” that swirls around in, on, and around us, in constant interaction, affects us moment by moment. The swirl affects how we feel, think, and act. However, by and large, we are not consciously unaware of these effects, though we feel them. Like

I, Jim, am not really a noun, but a verb. I am Jimming, a large process made up of a great many smaller processes. I, like you, am a happening. We saw that termites have a mound. Do we humans have a mound? Remember we defined a mound not just as dirt, but as the composite system (process of processes) that includes termites, dirt, air, water, micro-organisms, chemicals, channels, chewed-up wood, and a fungus. It is the mound that allows termite Little Terman to exist and function, and it is all the termites and everything else that allows the mound (Big Terman) to exist and function. For

Humans tend to identify their self with their brain, the part of them that stores all their past experiences. We tend to believe that if we could download this memory/feeling bank to a computer, then “we” would still be alive at the level of “who” we are. This is all wrong of course, because you are not you without your body and too, you are not you without being part of a Transacting Swarm (like termites) of chemicals and micro-organisms all of which will not be in the computer.

Since no two people have had the same experiences, no two humans hold the same grand theory or even the same theories at smaller levels of patterns of association in the brain. Each of us is an idiosyncratic individual just like each termite, despite the fact that we are socially formed by experiences in the world with other people in and outside our local personal mound. Being socially formed and being idiosyncratic are not incompatible things. In fact, they both follow from the very nature of the human brain. We find patterns with the help (guidance, teaching, mentoring) of others as interacting social beings, but since we never share all our experiences with anyone else, we are never the same as anyone else.

Every time we use stored memories—or put elements of them together in new combinations to imagine things—we change them as we put them back into LTM. That is why human LTM is very bad as memory in the sense of being a veridical record of the past. Human LTM is future oriented and sense-making oriented, not so much past oriented in the “true record” sense.

A final factor that determines how we experience our experiences and edit them for LTM is all the elements of our mound. All our micro-organisms, our relationships with other living beings, and our embodied groundedness in chemicals, dirt, air, pollution, energy, bodies, and institutions affect how we think, feel, and value when we have and edit our experiences. All this amounts to saying that you have only a very limited awareness of what your grand theory is and what all its sub-parts are.

This is so for three reasons. First, human memory (our store of “facts”) is very poor as a record of the past (because we change our memories every time we use them to think and plan for the future or to make sense of the present). Second, humans are not tropic to truth, but to “comfort”, to what allows them to survive, succeed, and cope with pain, suffering, and death. Third, humans are inextricably social (“herd”) animals and, thus, often value (care about) “belonging” and status more than they do about truth or sometimes even life itself.

Concepts like superorganism, stigmergy, homeostasis, idiosyncratic individuality, the mound as memory and as a cognitive system, all of which (and more) are necessary to “truly” describe termites, are not reducible to simple material properties. They all involve emergent (“new”) properties stemming from the mound as a complex system of physical, organic, and chemical parts.

Note that I have put a number of terms in scare quotes above, terms like “meant”, “read”, “directions”, “agents”, “directed”, “goals”, and “pursuit”. For humans, these terms all (we think) involve mental processing. However, given that we humans feel that Terman the termite, unlike humans, does not really have a “mind” (though we concede he has a brain), we do not really think anything very important (i.e., “cognitive”, “mental”, “spiritual”) is emerging in the case of the termites, though certainly we think this is the case for us “higher” creatures.

So, people who think that humans are not animals (“really”) because they cannot be reduced to their biology will be disappointed to find that even “low” animals like termites cannot be so reduced either. What I think really motivates people who want to see humans as more than animals is that they want to see humans as creatures with more worth, meaning, or significance. Once they concede that termites cannot be reduced to their biology, then they will simply move on to look for another way in which humans are “more”.

Humans will always win the “are we better than other animals” debate if we pick the words and define them in our own terms. If we find definitions that can actually apply across all or a great many animals, then it is not clear humans always (or ever) win. At any rate, humans are so new on the evolutionary scene and so imperiled that they can claim no victory as to who is “better” in terms of “intelligence” fairly defined. Sharks, termites, and cockroaches are way ahead of humans given their temporal record. On the other hand, when we define intelligence as what intelligence tests test, humans win hands down, though using that definition a good many intelligent people are stupid in any normal use of the word. Of course, humans have invented all sorts of impressive things, like vaccinations (which some nonetheless refuse to use) and nuclear weapons. We make medicines that eradicate infectious diseases but then make industrial food that makes us fat and sick and die early (by eradicating a good portion of what makes us ecologically diverse Transacting Swarms).

And remember, if you keep an open mind, it might turn out we are “less” and “worse”, or, in reality, just different in the way every animal species is different. There is probably no example of how strongly the human conscious mind is not tropic to truth but to comfort than religion (in its state as written texts—the issue of pre-written-down religions is a bit different). The religions of the book tend to claim there is an all knowing, all good, all powerful God, but write about “Him” as if “He” was a person with human-like emotions, some of them not all that uplifting from a human point of view.

far most—of what humans feel, do, and think is not at a conscious

Dennett, D. C. (2017). From bacteria to bach and back: The evolution of minds. New York: W. W. Norton. De Waal,

Some animal species can engage in both reactive aggression and planned aggression. Lions and chimpanzees, who can certainly lash out, can also bide their time and wait for the right circumstances to attack a rival or kill infants that are not their children. However, planned aggression takes on a whole new dimension in humans because we have language and expanded consciousness. Humans can plot, plan, deceive, and scheme better than any other animals.

Here arises one of the deepest problems large human groups have now long faced: How can a “citizen” know when the “authority” of the group (later the state) is being used for prosocial good or for selfish ends on the part of the powerful? Let’s call this the “social trust problem”. People in a large group or state are prone to docility in the face of authority, but when they lose trust that authority is applied fairly, the group or state is in peril or is forced to respond yet more brutally. The social trust problem became much more problematic when humans settled in villages, towns, and cities to engage in agriculture on a larger scale than they had ever done before. The change, I will argue, led us from being domesticated (albeit with a growing problem of “insiders” pursuing their own interests) to being monsters.

This mad science is just what we humans have done to ourselves, no mad scientist needed. We bred humans who survived oppression, domination, exploitation, hatred, anxiety, racism, elitism, classicism, schooling, toxic food and environments, and many other such things. The question is whether there are any “just humans” still alive and the answer is almost certainly no.

Furthermore, when baboons move up or down the social hierarchy, their stress hormones change, and they change as well in a great many different ways. So, a lower-status baboon is not the same as a high-status baboon—and vice versa—even if it is the same baboon.

The status of humans in a society affects their chemistry (e.g., their stress hormones) and that in turns effects their health, well-being, emotions, thoughts, beliefs, behavior, and social relationships. Furthermore, the more inequality in a human, society the worse these status effects are for nearly everyone in the society. High levels of inequality can be so toxic that, statistically speaking, everyone from bottom to top in a highly unequitable society is worse off on many health measures than people in more equitable, though not necessarily equal, societies. We

Montaigne invented the essay as a literary form, though his Essays are not much like the essays we are most familiar with today from school (that we owe to Bacon). Montaigne combined stories, autobiography, opinions, observations, and asides, all rooted in mundane life, in ways that have made him sound modern,

century peasant shimming and shaking dance (branle). Sarah Bakewell in her masterful 2010 book, How to Live: Or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer has this to say about Montaigne’s observation: “To try to understand the world is like grasping a cloud of gas, or a liquid, using hands that are themselves made of gas or water, so that they dissolve as you close them”. Montaigne

+Bakewell, S. (2010). How to live: Or a life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at an answer. New York: Other Press. Zweig, S. (1976). Montaigne. London: Pushkin Press.

A fetish is an unreal version of something else for which it “stands in” (takes its place) and is imagined to have some properties and powers of the real thing or to have power over the real thing thanks to the imagined shared properties or connections between the fetish and the thing it stands in for. The fetish can be living, dead, or an object (it can even be an activity). The fetish takes on a life of its own and can come to be seen as sacred, magical, taboo, or dangerous.

What an amazing device such a fetish would have been for the growth of thought. It would be the sort of thing that Claude Levi-Strauss used to call “good to think with”. The animals will be tempted by the fetish to wonder about the nature of real and unreal, dead and alive, now and future, connections and causation, intentions and beliefs, power and magic, and strategies of control that avoid direct conflict.

Of course, Harbinger is a “just so” story. But it is clear that long-ago humans learned how to use one thing to stand for another and came to believe the “stand in” had certain powers over

M* atory, J. L. (2018). The fetish revisited: Marx, Freud, and the gods black people make. Raleigh, NC: Duke University Press. ​[​Crossref​]​

Grades are meant to be part of an overall practice in which learning, performance, assessment, and grades all play a role in the service of development. But over time, people—teachers, students, families, policy makers, and even some psychometricians—take the grade to be an acceptable replacement for development. A good stand-in. They come to think that grades magically tell us something about the insides of students (“traits”, “dispositions”, “aptitudes”, and so forth). The grade becomes independent of the student and the practices in which the student is embedded. The student magically becomes a new thing, an “A student” or a “C student” or a “Failure”.

Fans of different sports teams have been known to attack and even kill each other. They wear team paraphernalia like totems of their tribe. Students who go to Yale think they are better than students who go to Harvard, and both think they are better than those who go to a public university like Berkeley or Michigan, just because private is better than public (a claim for which there is scant evidence).

Borders

When I started gaming, PC gamers felt superior to console gamers and both felt superior to “casual” players. People come to think that their town, state, and country are “better” and that implies that they are “better”. Right wingers in the United States think that small-town people are the “real Americans” and that they live in the “real America”. Even whites with few accomplishments think they are better than blacks who have many more. Light-skinned black people think they are better than dark-skinned ones. Some whites think they are better than Jewish people and even think Jewish people are not white. And on and on it goes.

The spirtome is all the “spirits”, that is, the ghosts, ideas, thoughts, visions, artifacts, and talismans that humans think “have power” beyond the mundane acts of causation as science knows them. Just as different people have different and changing microbiomes depending on their cultures and contexts, different people have different and changing spirtomes. And just as people’s microbiomes can become impoverished and toxic, depleting their physical and mental health, so too can their spirtomes.

Humans are inhabited not just by millions of little creatures (micro-organisms), like all other animals, but also by a myriad of ghosts, spirits, voices, spectral things and thoughts, controlling forces and desires and ideas that seem to have powers all of their own beyond mere “us”. This—a spirtome—no other animal has. “Spirits” do not speak to them, scare them, or heal them. They are “of the earth”. We humans stood up, left the dirt from which we came, and saw visions when we doubled ourselves and, in the act, transformed ourselves into monsters (or seers). The

We have answered the question “What is a human?” The answer is: We humans are “human-made monsters”. And we have answered the question “What makes humans different than animals?” The answer is: In addition to a microbiome, we have a spirtome.

Lies, fetishes, and doubling built human imagination. Our imaginations became populated not just by what we had seen and felt (“memories”), but by things unseen, spirit beings and aspects of things and their powers that go well beyond our senses. We entered the realm of fantasy and the merging, mixing, and matching of fantasy and reality in our heads and in our rituals and practices. Indeed, the border between the two, between fantasy and reality, became porous and shifting. The

Humans, thanks to lies, fetishes, and doubling, cannot just form memories, they can also make up stuff in their own heads that they never experienced or even could experience. This is the nature of fantasy and the human imagination. Once humans got this capacity, they could not only recall old memories to remind them what to do or avoid, they could make up imagined scenarios (images, scenes, sequences, plots, stories) that could allow them to try things out in their head; reflect on possibilities; make plans for the future; think (imagine) before they act; reconceive their memories based on new information; and worry themselves sick over all the ways one can suffer and die.

But I feel bad about lots of things, including the fact that fat shaming is so far down the list of things I feel bad about, that I will have a hard time getting to it before I die. So, people will say at my funeral—at least the liberals will—that he was an ok (sort of) person, but he was a fat-shamer and, thus, people should not read his books anymore, now that they know.

humans are not tropic to truth

Second, as I have argued earlier, humans are not tropic to truth. They care much more whether their stories and explanations give them comfort and make them feel that things make sense and happened for a reason than they do about simple truth (accuracy). Simple factual accounts do not move humans nearly as much as stories that explain things in ways that make humans feel better.

We also use the Imaginarium to cut and paste elements of our past experience (in life and in media) to create fantasies of all different sorts. This allows us to plan and to innovate. It also allows us to vividly imagine all the horrors that can happen to us and the horrors we fear lurk unseen around us. Besides, the Interpreter and the

Almost always, the Nag’s assessments, judgments, appraisals, and evaluations are rooted in social and cultural conventions and stories. It is the inner voice of our families, social groups, societies, and cultures judging us, condemning us, and making us feel guilty.

Whether we regret the slice of pizza we just ate and thus cannot really enjoy it or worry that playing video games is waste of time, that is the Nag in action. Of course, the Nag can sometimes be helpful, but when it tells us we are not as good as others because we are not as rich or good looking as they are, it is endangering our well-being and could be a one-way ticket to depression.

Outside the Interpreter, the Imaginarium, and the Nag, the conscious mind includes parts that can think rationally and logically and engage in ethical thought at a philosophical level. We can call this the Rational Mind. It is a weak feature, full of bugs. It is encouraged by education, often without much success, and sometimes with disastrous results when it produces emotionless intellectual zombies or self-serving fanatics with a favored “theoretical” axe to grind.

There is another system in the brain that is partly conscious and partly unconscious. This is what I will call the Appraising Brain. This is the part of the brain that helps us, not to judge ourselves (i.e., the Nag’s job), but to judge the “right” thing to do. At an unconscious level, all animals have this capacity. They “feel” that certain ways of proceeding—given how they are being affected in given contexts—are “right”. This is how animals know what foods to eat, how to proceed in battle, how to act to get a mate, whether a nest is working, and when to change course in their struggle to survive.

After humans have been taught, learned, reflected on, and practiced new ways of conscious appraisal, these judgments eventually become unconscious and automatic, part of the Automatic Appraiser. This process can, of course, be undone and brought back to conscious attention later if actions fail to work via automatic unconscious adjustments in the field of practice. The final part of the conscious mind is sometimes called the Default System. We will call it the Musing System. When humans are not occupied in any activity, their brain does not turn off. It just muses, daydreams, and associates, sometimes right

The six conscious systems in our brains do not for the most part orient to truth or to a direct engagement with reality. The Interpreter is oriented to comfort, not truth. The Rational Mind is oriented to finding reasons and evidence for what we already believe. The Nag is oriented toward disapproval of ourselves based on other people’s opinions. The Appraisers make value judgments about actions and decisions based on social forces (e.g., media, corporations, states, and cultural bias and fears) that do not have our best interests at heart. And the Musing System allows us swim in a sea of musing that for many humans becomes filled with worry. Finally,

British culture (of a certain working-class nature) influenced my mental makeup, especially my emotional unavailability. The influences of Catholicism, Italians, and an English background were all filtered through class in its distinctively American form. Everyone’s family I knew came from a non-middle-class background but had parents who were struggling to become middle class in the petite bourgeoisie’s sense of Marx.

All this is now dead. Catholicism today bears no resemblance to the Catholicism (I thought) I knew when young. The United States today is not remotely the country I thought it was. It is statistically and demographically a very different country than it was when I was growing up. The San Jose Italian world I grew up in is long gone and so is San Jose, which became “Silicon Valley” to my great surprise.

people make powerful changes, as I did by transferring Catholicism to academics, but such changes are still patches. We always are in conversation with the social voices in our heads. These voices form the Gang of Six and the Gang of Six enforces their power over us. Every patch (change) comes from a social experience and changes the voices, in small or big ways, but these voices never stop evaluating and nagging us as we experience new things, leaving us sometimes adrift at sea and sometimes changing course to risk seeking a new horizon.

Human language at its origins may have been full of fetishes and has been thought of in fetish-like ways ever since. Humans long confused words and what they stand for and attributed magical properties to words, our very definition of a fetish. For example, some cultures think that telling someone your name gives them power over you. Many people, even in our own culture, cannot say their own name over and over again without discomfort.

Words are anchors around which social interaction takes place. They are ways to start, continue, and change conversations, interactions, and relationships. They are ways to socially coordinate, collaborate, and feud. We think with words, of course, but this means (as we saw in the Gang of Six chapter) that we think through all the conversations, interactions, texts, and media we have experienced.

We routinely talk about gender as binary, when science and the modern world have amply shown it is not. We celebrate free markets in the United States when in reality there are next to none, since nearly every sphere of the economy is controlled by a tiny number of “big players”. We rarely ask whether the meanings of words we take for granted have passed their use-by date. If

When someone has come back to “his senses”, he has not actually returned to any place he was before. While we can say “I just can’t get it into my head”, the head is not container or a place where we can put something. When I marshal my facts to defeat your argument, I am not actually at war. When your mind wanders, it hasn’t actually gone anyplace. Because we have a picture view of language, we regularly confuse ourselves. We get arguments like this one: Since God is perfect, He must exist, because if He did not exist, He would not then be perfect because something that exists is more perfect than something that does not. This is a version of the famous ontological argument for the existence of God.

We wonder what’s outside the universe because we can talk about insides and outsides. We wonder what existed before time, since we can talk about before and after. We think some force must have designed the world because when we use the word design we think of designers and it is easy to see design-like features in the world.

We think of intelligence as some property of the brain rather than a property of behaviors, even though many a person with a high IQ is an idiot. We think animals just live, but we believe humans live “for something”, that their worth is defined by some “purpose”, that their lives have to have “meaning”, though we have never been able to agree on what makes a life “meaningful”.

Language leads humans to think about the world and their lives in all sorts of false ways. People so strongly believe these falsehoods that they never question them, a magical effect indeed.

Language is the major way in which humans make sense of things, make sense to each other, and even make sense of themselves. And yet language is a flawed system. Meaning is based on social conventions and, like all social conventions, is only good when the conventions are still useful for the problems they were designed to solve. Language is a perspective, “take”, or viewpoint on the world that is limited by the limited knowledge and powers of the creatures who use it, namely us. This does not mean language is unimportant. But it is dangerous unless we do two things: (1) realize where it works imperfectly and invent (and use) new “languages” like the language of mathematics, and (2) treat language as an ongoing conversation and negotiation that must be monitored, questioned, and changed by a non-fetish-filled and ever updating view of the world and the people around us.

Gee, J. P. (2004). Situated learning and language: A critique of traditional schooling. London: Routledge. Glenberg, A. M., & Gallese, V. (2012). Action-based language: A theory of language acquisition, comprehension, and production. Cortex, 48, 905–922. ​[​Crossref​]​

High level of cortisol, one of the stress hormones, kills brain cells and shrinks the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain we use for memory and learning. Ongoing stress can cause depression, anxiety, and personality disorders, in addition to many other health issues including lowering the effectiveness of our immune systems.

Every social group, small or large, needs to recruit and retain members; otherwise, there is no group. The group needs to teach members how to be “good” members and how to accomplish the goals of the group. This is true of families, interest groups, churches, institutions, towns, and states.

Every social group has to develop ways for “members” to behave, value, believe, act, and interact as members of the group. The group has to have principles about what makes a person an acceptable “citizen” of the group. In turn, the group promises “good citizens” a sense of belonging, meaning, and safety. I will call any system of collective ideas, values, and beliefs about what counts as an acceptable “member” (“citizen”) in a group, the group’s civic ideology. Ideology is not necessarily good or bad, and no group can cohere long without

There is always a pedagogical arm to civic ideology, always ways to transmit it formally or informally and to assess group member’s learning of and allegiance to the civic ideology. Again, using an old word with a specific new meaning, I will use the term “civics” to mean the practices that are meant to “teach” civic ideology. We can label civic ideology in terms of the group

Lowering stress and inequality can lead to more mutual trust among citizens (“social capital”) but could also lead to citizens’ ability to collaborate to oppose the government or policies they do not like. Causing division and distrust is one effective way for a government or a political party to end such collaboration.

Tomasello argues that humans’ evolving abilities to cooperate with each other took a unique form. Humans became able to be shared agents with others. They could act as a “we”, not just as an “I” or not just as individuals acting in parallel, like children engaged in parallel play. They could act together with shared intentions, knowledge, and norms (values). This meant that humans could regulate their behavior by monitoring their own behavior and thoughts, but also by monitoring the implications of other people’s perspectives and behaviors for their own behavior, intentions, and self-evaluation. This ability to realize that others have different perspectives than one’s own and that, in a cooperative endeavor, multiple perspectives need to be considered and combined affected how humans represented ideas and the world in their heads.

However it arose, culture requires more than joint attention and joint agency on the order of hunting parties. People need to regulate and monitor their own behavior and thinking not just by the perspectives and evaluations of fellow small group members, but by the norms (values, “rules”, standards) of a large group of people. This large group (a culture) is composed of people who may not know each other personally, but who share common ground based on similar ways of being raised and socialized; on shared history and stories; and on shared experiences and interpretations of those experiences.

Humans are, for better or worse, not creatures who can live without enchantment. No one wants to see their loved one as skin and bones. No one wants to think the stars are just big rocks and the sun just hot gas. No one wants to think sunrise and sunset don’t portend anything. No one wants to think the meal they slaved over is just fodder for the gut.

None of us knew much about the Humanities, though the others had read literature in school. Perhaps their prior exposure to literature in school is why none of them wanted to teach the course. In the end, I volunteered to teach a course on “stylistics”, a course that would use linguistics to analyze poetry. I knew nothing about the area, though I had heard of it, and I had read exactly one poem written in English in my life. At the time, I lived with a woman who spoke English, Italian, and Spanish and was extremely well read in the canonical literature of all three languages.

What made a person utterly uneducated in poetry and literature to be so moved by it? Later, when I started to teach the stylistics class, I found one reason that I was moved by poetry was that I had not studied it in school. School had not ruined it for me as I found out later it had for so many students who took my course. Another reason was this: As a non-middle-class person, raised apart from “the Tradition” and “high culture”, I read these poems as marvelous linguistic expressions of the human heart, human dilemmas and longings, and human aspirations for meaning and worth. When

Reading poetry unschooled—stuff that I knew was supposed to be “High Culture”, not the sort of thing anyone I knew growing up would have read or discussed—I realized that I could understand, love, and use this poetry just as who I was, both a human being and one not born into the right class. I felt these authors were not speaking to elites, the rich, or the highly educated, but to people, any person who had a body and a soul, to people as humans with the same loves and pains as each other, and to people as absolute individuals who could sing their own songs. I felt they were speaking to me. As I learned more about poetry and literature over the years, I learned something that really surprised me.

Something strange happened when Shakespeare came to school. When his work was made canonical and turned into a required school subject, poor and working-class people stopped wanting to read him and often the richer students read him diligently only for a good grade. Shakespeare and other great authors were captured by schools and colleges to represent high culture, the birthright of the elites, and became a way to enculturate (and subdue) non-elites. Shakespeare’s texts were given credentialed and certified meanings and interpretations unopen to the uneducated, indeed unopen to anymore who did not pay heed to the literary high priests of interpretation in English departments. When

Poetry is what we might call “slow language” analogous to “slow food”. The slow food movement encourages us to think about, reflect on, and work with every ingredient in a meal and to make all of the ingredients into an ensemble where each ingredient matters in a particular way; where each ingredient interacts with every other one; and where the whole becomes not just more than the sum of its parts, but a unique joy. Slow food makes something mundane magical and turns food into something both cultural and pan-human.

as good cooking helps people to transcend their brute reality as eaters and helps them to understand food as part of human culture, history, sociality, and the life of the mind and the body, so, too, does poetry and literature.

we can use the poem as the basis of a personal inquiry in which we, often with the help of others, make meanings “for” and “with” Emily Dickinson (being fair to her and her context and her past) and for ourselves. We can ask what Emily might have meant in her time and place and what her poem and life can tell us now about her time and ours. We can ask what meanings and imaginings the poem has given rise to in its long life past Emily Dickinson.

make the artifact part of my own Transacting Swarm. At the same time, I see the artifact as about all humans as humans, as all equally worthy of life and flourishing, not as divided into better and worse. Through combined, reciprocal, and interacting specific understanding and universal understanding, I understand the author’s life and my own life more deeply as unique instantiations of diverse, but still common human life and, at the same time, regenerate my link to all human life, indeed all life on earth.

Discourse Of Gee =

Here are the things that contribute to any word’s embodied meaning for human beings: all past uses of the word they have experienced in talk and text, all contexts in which they experienced the word, now stored in imagination, all connections and associations the word built up in all these uses and contexts, all feelings and emotions tied to the word the person felt in those contexts, all actions and reactions from self and others people have experienced as the word was used as parts of actions and interactions, all memories the person has that involve the word and its associations and ties that word and its associations make to other memories. Some elements are conscious and some are not, but all have affected the grand theory that is the network of our brain. Each word is like the taste and smell of Proust’s “petites madeleines” in Remembrance of Things Past. It is a key that unlocks a plethora of embodied associations, feelings, thoughts, beliefs, remembrances, effects, and often, too, prods the imagination and awaits the future of its own change and growth.

While humans have learned to collaborate in groups, they have problems as groups get larger and larger. Their most basic loyalty is to kin, to family and close friends. Beyond these groups, people often readily cooperate with small groups of people they know personally, even if they are not friends, such as work teams. People have the hardest time cooperating in large groups, like institutions, cities, and states, made up of many people they do not know as individuals.

• Barkow, J. H., Cosmides, L., & Tooby, J. (Eds.). (1992). The adapted mind: Evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture. New York: Oxford University Press. Cosmides, L. (1989). The logic of social exchange: Has natural selection shaped how humans reason? Studies with the Wasson Selection task. Cognition, 31(3), 187–276. ​
• Zolli, A., & Healy, A. M. (2012). Resilience: Why things bounce back. New York: Simon & Schuster.

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